LLM Reference
OpenAI API

Using Whisper on OpenAI API

Implementation guide · OpenAI Transcribe · OpenAI

Serverless

OpenAI API exposes Whisper through model ID whisper-1. Use the setup steps, sourced pricing, capabilities, and official provider links below to validate this route before deployment.

Last refreshed 2026-06-07. Next refresh: weekly.

Quick Start

  1. 1
    Create an account at OpenAI API and generate an API key.
  2. 2
    Use the OpenAI API SDK or REST API to call whisper-1 — see the documentation for request format.
  3. 3
    You'll be billed $0.006/min. See full pricing.

Code Examples

Install
pip install openai
API key
OPENAI_API_KEY
Model ID
whisper-1

Use the model slug directly, e.g. "gpt-4o" or "gpt-4.1-mini".

import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI()  # reads OPENAI_API_KEY from env
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="whisper-1",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Pricing on OpenAI API

TypeRate
Audio minute$0.006/min

Capabilities

MultimodalAudio

About Whisper

Whisper 1 is OpenAI's general-purpose speech recognition API model, based on Whisper large-v2, released March 2023. Supports multilingual transcription across 50+ languages, speech translation into English, and language identification. Priced at $0.006/min of audio (flat per-minute rate). Exposed via /v1/audio/transcriptions and /v1/audio/translations. For new applications, gpt-4o-transcribe offers better accuracy. API ID: whisper-1.

Model Specs

Released2023-03-01
ArchitectureAudio / Speech

Provider

OpenAI API
OpenAI API

OpenAI

San Francisco, California, United States